The certificate awarded Oderhohwo Joseph Efe, Carter Efe’s legal name, a “First Class Upper” in Biochemistry. However, a ‘First Class Upper’ does not exist in any university classification. The student club named on the certificate does not exist at Babcock, and the department belongs to a different college. The statement was supposed to serve as an indictment on Efe, but instead, it gave him more material for his livestream.

A few days earlier, the rapper YCee had appeared on the Afropolitan Podcast and complained that Nigeria had become too comfortable with ignorance. He was concerned that academic excellence was no longer celebrated, and instead, rewarded people such as Habeeb Hamzat, a young Tiktok livestreamer better known as ‘Peller’ from Ikorodu, a town near the outskirts of Lagos. The expression that emerged from the conversation was the “Olodo Uprising”, a name which had surfaced in many online conversations prior.

The word Olodo is a Yoruba slang and insult for someone considered dull or academically weak. Its literal translation is someone who scores, or more accurately, ‘owns zero’ in a test. The “uprising” part of it is what many view as a reversal in status, where people who were once placed at the bottom of the social class hierarchy are now commanding the largest audiences and even, some of the most visible rewards. Peller has taken that position and has made it profitable. And the worst part, at least in the eyes of his critics, is that he appears to have no desire to leave it.

The business of looking foolish

I never understood why Peller had this kind of online persona, until I watched this 2024 interview. He said he first tried making videos in “good English”, but he only got an average of a hundred people watching them, and five were his family members. When he began acting dull and speaking bad English, thousands of people watched, so he continued.

This matters because much of the criticism of Peller assumes that he is truly a ‘fool’ or he does not understand how he appears. But he made two iterations of himself. The wiser version was ignored and the ‘foolish’ version acquired traction, an audience and a huge amount of money. He simply followed the better result.

Researchers have described this kind of performance as “calibrated amateurism”, where a creator appears careless or unprepared as part of their act, and it is the key factor in Peller’s livestreams. His reactions are too loud, he tends to misunderstand simple statements and his English is presented as something that is haphazard and uncouth. There is something about his performances that feels unscripted, which is precisely what makes it convincing.

Speaking in Queen’s English remains an important class marker in Nigeria. Before the content of your speech is judged, it is an indicator that he or she has received quality education, discipline and professional competence. But there is also the irony that Nigerian Pidgin is spoken across the country and carries much of our humour and popular music, yet it is still treated as the ‘poor man’s language’ or people who cannot speak basic English. Peller’s low quality English would disqualify him from belonging to a more sophisticated crowd, but it is also what keeps thousands of people on his livestream.

This does not mean every foolish thing he does is some sign of ‘secret intelligence’. Sometimes, nonsense is simply nonsense. But once nonsense becomes a successful product, whatever income it produces becomes evidence that the performer understood his examiner.

What is a degree for?

My mother still asks about my microbiology degree. She asks whether I speak to anyone from my department, what my former classmates are doing now and whether ‘so-and-so’ has travelled. Then she changes the subject. She has never said that my degree was a waste of money, but I can almost feel that question like a prescence in the room, still lingering.

I now work as a journalist. It is clear that my degree and profession do not align, but what it mainly proved was that I could pass examinations. This complicates the joke of the Olodo Uprising, because educated Nigerians can laugh at Peller, but the labour market outside school speaks of a different reality and a different marking scheme.

For many Nigerians of my mother’s generation, a university degree came with a fairly reliable plan for life as an adult. A graduate was able to find salaried work, rent a home, marry and raise children. Of course, there were those in the minority, but it happened often enough for the degree to retain its authority. Oil money had concentrated opportunity around the government and the formal economy, and a degree gave people access to the ministries, banks and hospitals where good jobs could be found. Education was respected because people could see the value in what it produced.

But just like the Avatar, everything changed when the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) arrived. It brought with it devaluation, wage restraint and job losses. By the early 1990s, researchers were already writing about unemployed Nigerian graduates. The people who had jobs watched the value of their salaries fall, and many began to either trade, drive taxis, or create their own small businesses on the side to make ends meet. A degree proved that a person had studied and persevered, but it also proved that this person came from a family that had the financial capacity to pay school fees and support several years of education. Fluent English carried similar advantages. Still, no matter how dire the situation looks, school is not a scam and education has not become useless. World Bank research found that Nigerians with tertiary education earned considerably more when they secured wage employment. The problem is how few people secure it.

For the first quarter of 2024, data from the National Bureau of Statistics show only 16 per cent of working Nigerians having a structured salaried mode of employment, while 92.7 per cent work informally. Unemployment among people with post-secondary education was 9 per cent when compared with a 5.3 per cent national rate. Jarvis, a content creator who is Peller’s partner and a university graduate, countered by asking what educated young Nigerians should do if there were no jobs. Her question didn’t go viral, but it helps explain much of the anger behind that argument.

Despite this, the nation boasts of over three hundred universities, and it continues to multiply in leaps and bounds. But, fewer people are applying for admissions. Figures from the National Universities Commission show that 199 universities received fewer than one hundred applications in the last admission cycle, through the national entrance system, JAMB, while thirty-four received no applications at all. It shows that Nigeria has more institutions awarding credentials, even as its dwindling economy becomes less able to reward the people who obtain them.

The other examiner

The consensus is that universities reward knowledge while social media rewards performance. But, in my view, examinations are also a form of performance. You find a student learning the syllabus, studying the marking scheme and providing the answers an examiner expects. After a successful rinse and repeat routine cycle of several years, the student finally receives their reward—a certificate.

For Peller, Tiktok is his ‘school examiner’, and its algorithm is its marking scheme. It asks the following questions. Did many people watch your content? Did they comment on it? Did it travel across multiple accounts? Did the viewer stay until the end? Do loyal followers come bearing gifts in return? Tiktok, like other social media platforms, does not require its creator to be accurate or well informed. Instead, it simply rewards how you captivate and retain attention, and Peller understood what this examiner wanted.

The phrase “performance economy” is an established concept in circular-economy theory, created by Walter Stahel, in which businesses sell the function of a product rather than the product itself. For instance, one can sell the idea of quality transportation instead of cars, or uninterrupted power supply instead of a light bulb. But my version of Nigeria’s performance economy is the growing requirement that work, knowledge and even personality be made visible, entertaining and measurable before they are rewarded. We see it already in our everyday lives. Doctors are explaining medicine through comedy skits, politicians are dancing for the camera, journalists are constantly being encouraged to develop online personalities, and graduates who cannot find jobs are advised to build ‘personal brands’, as though branding alone is a solution for unemployment.

Peller understood this early. He once claimed that he earns between fifteen and twenty million naira in a good week, amounts that would be the envy of many working class Nigerians today, most of whom barely earn above the seventy thousand naira minimum wage. Even though repeating large figures is part of his image and gaudy caricature of wealth, money is also a central contributor to the outrage around him. If he earned nothing, nobody will spend weeks debating what his success says about Nigeria.

This shift can also be observed worldwide. UNESCO says that 35 per cent of creators income worldwide can be attributed to digital revenue, an increase from 17 per cent in 2018. However, it has gained so much impact in Nigeria because the arrival of the creator economy happened after corporate employment had failed many young people. In wealthier economies, online creation can supplement a career, but here, it is an unreliable escape from the absence of one. A creator has no guaranteed of a salary, pension or promotion to look forward to. They have to pay for the phone, mobile data, lighting and post-production costs, while the platform can simply change its rules at will without consultation. If the audience loses interest, there is no employer present or required to keep paying for these expenses. The 2026 Africa Creator Economy Report found that about six in ten African creators earned less than one hundred dollars a month. It is easier to recognise failure in conventional employment if, let’s say an unemployed administrative officer loses work for almost a year from a known organisation. However, a young creator can post videos for two years without finding an audience, and decide to stop posting, without any formal business foreclosure. That failure is harder to count.

Expertise can also succeed online, but it must become entertaining. Chinonso Egemba trained as a doctor before becoming Aproko Doctor. He uses humour and storytelling to explain medicine. His success revealed that it was no longer enough to be correct, or to be a medical practitioner in his case. He also had to keep people watching.

I must confess that it has its benefits. Experts have sometimes confused industry jargon with serious thought, and social media has forced many of them to explain themselves more clearly for a mass audience. But visibility should not be mistaken for value. A nurse can notice a wrong dosage and quietly prevent a medical emergency. There may be no video, applause or public recognition. The only evidence of her competence is that nothing bad happened. The performance economy in that case, will struggle to reward work like this because there was no audience there to watch.

No graduation day

In January this year, the American streamer IShowSpeed visited Lagos. Peller tried to approach him during a livestream, but he was stopped by security. He later followed Speed’s convoy through the city on horseback, shouting, trying to attract his attention. Before that event, Peller was proof that an online following could make education and professional status irrelevant, but on that road, he simply became small fry compared to Speed with a much larger following. The evidence of his own numbers could not make Speed stop.

The economic value of a university degree may not be the same as it once was, but at least, the institution does not ask you to sit your final examinations again every morning. A platform offers no equivalent security, for it requires a continuous examination whose results are public, with an ever changing audience with shifting loyalties. Today, and every day, the performer must wake up and qualify once again, for a reward that is never guaranteed.

Postscript

I almost never published this essay for two reasons. First, I am extremely late to the party (this was a conversation that took place since June), and everyone I know had some pretty insightful takes. So this is me putting a limb out there and hoping that it resonates. My shoutout today is for the good people at , for most of their work informed this essay. It was also shaped by what I have been learning through MTN’s Media Innovation Programme at Pan-Atlantic University. It has only been three months, but I already feel a thousand times smarter than I was when I began.

Wishing you a blissful new month!

My Receipts

The Olodo Uprising “Ycee Sparks Debate Over ‘Olodo Uprising’ Comment,” Channels Television, June 26, 2026.

Nigeria’s labour market National Bureau of Statistics, Nigeria Labour Force Survey, Q1 2024.

Education and employment World Bank, More, and More Productive, Jobs for Nigeria: A Profile of Work and Workers (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2015).

Calibrated amateurism Crystal Abidin, “#familygoals: Family Influencers, Calibrated Amateurism, and Justifying Young Digital Labor,” Social Media + Society, 2017.

African creator earnings Africa Creator Economy Report 2.0, 2026.

The original performance economy Walter R. Stahel and Roland Clift, “Stocks and Flows in the Performance Economy,” in Taking Stock of Industrial Ecology.

In January 2026, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie took one of her twin sons, Nkanu, to Euracare Hospital in Lagos for a routine scan. He was 21 months old. He had an infection and was due to travel to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore a few days later, where specialists were waiting to see him. Instead, he died in Lagos.

According to the account Adichie later published, Nkanu arrived at the hospital conscious, but was sedated with propofol before the scan. She says he was given too much of the drug and was not properly monitored afterwards. He went into cardiac arrest and never regained consciousness.

The real problems began after his death. Adichie says that while the hospital’s medical director acknowledged that Nkanu had received too much propofol, the death certificate, however, listed meningitis as the cause of death. Euracare requested a coroner’s inquest, then went to court to stop it from proceeding. It obtained a stay.

Adichie had advantages that most Nigerian families never will. Her husband is a doctor. She could afford treatment abroad. Specialists in the United States were already expecting her son, and her influence as a public figure was so great, that even President Tinubu publicly offered his condolences after Nkanu died. Even so, months later, she says her family still does not have a truthful account of how he died.

Adebose Onifade is not a globally recognized figure or someone immediately recognizable to the president’s team. But just like Adichie, she too knew grief, and hers lasted for six years.

Pelumi Onifade was a 20-year-old history student and an intern with the online station Gboah TV. Witnesses said they saw members of the Lagos State Task Force take him away after he filmed a politician appearing to fire into a crowd during the October 2020 #EndSARS protests. His family spent days moving between police stations and hospitals before someone directed them to the mortuary at Ikorodu General Hospital. His mother found him there herself.

For six years, the police denied ever taking Pelumi into custody. His body remained unidentified in the mortuary. It took a lawsuit, a court order and, eventually, DNA testing before the state formally accepted that the body was his. The autopsy that was meant to explain how he died has still not been released.

The details of these two deaths are different. One child died in one of Lagos’s best-known private hospitals. The other disappeared after covering one of the biggest protests in Nigeria’s recent history. Yet both families found themselves asking institutions for the same thing: a truthful account of how someone they loved died. The same indifference operates on both sides of death: the state does not come for you when you are dying and does not account for you when you are dead.

Who does the state serve?

A health system tells you who a country is built for. Nigeria was built, from the start, for someone else. The medical system the British ran here was, until about 1920, meant to treat European officials and civil servants. This is why older, established hospitals were located where European officials lived. The first general out-patient clinic in Lagos,built in 1914, and the first military hospital, built in 1893, were built with colonial and military health in mind. It was care rationed by a policy of segregation that put Europeans first.

The degradation of our healthcare system was an accumulation of patterns. At independence, Nigeria took over that system and largely left it as it was. The oil boom that followed funded new hospital buildings more readily than the staff, drugs, and maintenance that would have made them work. When oil prices fell in the 1980s, the government adopted a World Bank-backed Structural Adjustment Programme that cut public spending on health and education.

After structural adjustment, paying out of pocket for emergency services became a way of life. No law obliged anyone to treat an emergency until 2014, no national ambulance service existed until 2022, and even the basic health fund created reserves just five per cent for emergency transport.

Since 1988, Nigeria has split health across its three tiers of government: the federal government runs the teaching hospitals, states run the general hospitals, and primary care is handed to local governments.

This delineation of roles meant that the primary care, the first line for most Nigerians, was handed over to the weakest tier of government. It also meant these funds were vulnerable to state governors who could keep the money or simply withhold allocations meant to fund it. This happens because, as one senior official told researchers, the sector had “no formal accountability system” at all.

Nigeria has since spent, on average, around five per cent of its budget on health, despite hosting the 2001 Abuja summit where African leaders pledged to allocate at least fifteen per cent of annual government spending to health. This was later known as the Abuja Declaration.

This is what a Nigerian in an emergency arrives to. There is very little emergency care in this country, and the little there is must usually be paid for before it is given. Money helps, and in most cases money is the difference. But it was not the difference for Adichie. Her son died in one of the best-regarded hospitals in Lagos, with Johns Hopkins waiting for him, because past a certain point the problem here is not what you can pay. The system fails at a level money does not reach.

The arithmetic of survival

Nigeria records nearly 2.4 million deaths a year, and the national emergency agency has estimated that at least half of them (around 1.2 million) could have been prevented by a functional emergency response system. There is no disease in Nigeria that has killed as many people. One of the most critical moments for a Nigerian is the wait between a body failing and help arriving.

The first problem is the lack of actual emergency response systems. In 2022, Nigeria launched a national emergency scheme that promised free care for the first forty-eight hours, as well as 112 as a dedicated toll line. But a recent survey found the line reachable in only about four-fifths of states, that callers routinely do not get through, and that in one poll only about one in twenty Nigerians said they would call the designated toll line in an emergency because they would rather trust family or neighbours. The national emergency scheme currently reaches fewer than two in every thousand of the emergencies the country records each year.

Part of this ambivalence is because in most cases, when there are actually calls made, no ambulance comes. Because there are almost no ambulances. The country runs about 500 of them for more than two hundred million people; the agency responsible for emergency response says it needs 4,000, and has fewer than 1,000 paramedics to staff whatever it has. That is roughly one ambulance for every 400,000 citizens, against a World Health Organization benchmark of one for every fifty thousand, the standard set for low- and middle-income countries like Nigeria. The country has, in other words, about an eighth of the ambulances the world considers the minimum. So Nigerians do what Nigerians do best:improvise. Public ambulances carry about seven per cent of medical emergencies. Nearly half of the sick and injured are carried in danfos, the yellow commercial minibuses, held upright between strangers and market goods, and most of the rest arrive in private cars or on foot. The bus is the ambulance, and the driver is the paramedic.

The roads supply a steady share of these deaths. The Federal Road Safety Corps recorded 5,289 deaths in 2025. The World Health Organization puts the true figure near 40,000, roughly seven times higher, and estimates that a quarter of all road deaths in Africa occur in Nigeria. If the true number is anywhere near the WHO’s, the state is not just failing to save these people; it is not even counting most of them.

The workforce waiting at the other end is just as thin. Nigeria has around 55,000 licensed doctors for a population above 200 million, down from roughly 66,000 the year before, which works out to about one doctor for every 4,000 people. The figure most often held up by most Nigerian officials and doctors as adequate is one per 600, though the WHO has never prescribed such a ratio. The Federal Ministry of Health estimates that the number of doctors the country would need to reach that mark is close to 400,000. As I have written before, the gap is driven above all by emigration, the departure Nigerians call japa, and it leaves the doctors who stay carrying loads that would be considered unsafe elsewhere, anywhere without the means to correct it.

Suppose the patient gets past all of that and reaches a hospital. There are still bills to contend with. Since 2014, the National Health Act has prohibited hospitals from turning away emergency patients. But there is no accountability mechanism to enforce this, sending relatives to run for a deposit before some doctors lift a hand. The emergency agency admits that Nigerians avoid ambulances because they expect to be billed on arrival, free-care promise or not. In one state’s emergency response launch, nine in ten patients still reached hospital outside the official system, because they could not afford it and did not trust it.

None of the reforms required here are especially ambitious. A Good Samaritan law has been discussed for years and would cost almost nothing. Section 20 of the National Health Act already prohibits hospitals from refusing emergency treatment, and NEMSAS already exists. The critical factor that has been missing is the willingness to act. Unfortunately the system even strikes those willing to do so

The Good Samaritan on camera

A bystander with a phone is not unique to Nigeria. We assume filming is a genuine attempt to reach more people and summon help, but it is the consequence of a system that has taught people that help arrives faster with a viral post than calling an ambulance.

Publicity has become one of the few emergency responses that still functions, and only at the speed of a shared video, because that is the speed the state has left people with. However, it is not a clean cut solution to attaining immediate emergency services, as most of these videos are not always received in real time with accurate locations. Nigerians give first aid to injured strangers at rates far below those in wealthier countries; in Norway, bystanders help a crash victim about 9 out of 10 times. When Nigerians are asked why they hold back, the answer comes in two words: police wahala.

Nigerians who have stopped to help have been arrested as suspects and made to pay for their own release. A man in Abuja once stumbled upon a stranger who had been stabbed and did the thing you are meant to do: take him to a hospital. His reward was detention, questioning and a charge of ten thousand naira to bail himself out. By then, the stranger had already gone two days without care, turned away from one hospital after another. We do not know if he even survived.

Doctors are not exempt from this fear either. Because police often treat physicians who attend to emergency victims as accomplices, most doctors refrain from getting involved until a police report exists. This is because Nigeria has no Good Samaritan law protecting the person who helps. The emergency agency’s own coordinator has asked, more than once, for one to be passed.

The hand over our eyes

Nkanu’s death reminds me of the first dead body I ever saw. I was nine years old.

We were driving to church, the air conditioner was not working, and the windows were down. I smelled it before I saw it. The body rotting on the far side of the road stuck out like a sore thumb because we were in a high brow area; we don’t see this here often.

It was too far for me to see him clearly. My mother’s hand quickly came across my face from the front seat to shield my young self from the sight. We fell into silence. Later, someone put on gospel music. We did not stop. I remember asking why in the days that followed, but my mother and older siblings kept silent, as though it was a taboo subject. It was only in later years that I finally understood why through exposure to media and literature.

It is bizarre to imagine that Adichie and Onifade’s children had relatively better experiences than the average Nigerian—at least they know how their children died and where. For millions more, even this basic knowledge is a luxury. Families of people like that corpse may never even know when or how. This sense of poor emergency response has affected how I have seen a country that appears to value human lives differently. We have all learned the same reflex my mother had: to look away and keep going.

It is why even though a person bleeding on the road deserves hands, not an audience, there is fear over this most basic communal response. The culture of documenting rather than intervening did not come out of nowhere; the state built it. People hesitate because helping has been made dangerous, and because no one has bothered to protect those willing to try.

When the state fails to care, it has often weaponised its instruments to self-preserve. Missing records and poor structures are used to avoid accountability. Adichie’s late son is not a statistic because of her mother. Onifade’s late son is more than a number because of the social media interest in his case during the #EndSARS protests. Not everyone, in a country of millions, is able to rely on such situations. Everyone, in this country of millions, should not need to.

The same logic that leaves people to die on the road follows them into death. A state that will not spend to reach a dying citizen has little reason to account for one who is already gone. The missing ambulance and autopsy belong to the same chain of failure. A citizen who cannot make the state act while alive leaves behind a family that is rarely in a stronger position to demand answers. What happened to Nkanu Adichie’s medical records and Pelumi Onifade’s autopsy happens, in less visible ways, to Nigerian families every day.

Memento mori

We tell the dead to go in peace. In Igbo we say laa n’udo; in Yoruba, Pelumi’s language, it is sun re. The words ask for peace, but peace is difficult where the truth remains withheld by the institutions responsible for keeping it.

I understand my mother’s hand better now than I did when I was nine. She could not move the body from the road, and she could not have known who left it there or whether anyone had stopped. She could only decide what her child would be made to see.

The government will describe this as a problem of resources, as it usually does. The explanation does not withstand much scrutiny. Nigeria can afford convoys, state funerals and overseas medical treatment for senior officials. Public money follows political pressure. Emergency care does not generate much of it. The officials who decide health budgets do not depend on the hospitals they oversee because, when they become seriously ill, they can leave the country. It means they can also flee accountability.

Both boys have been buried. No one has been made to answer for how either of them died.

Postscript

My last essay, which was self authored and self edited, was written about Nigerian optimism in the midst of its failures. I am fully aware that this essay is an antithesis to that, and due to its nature as well as work commitments, it was not the easiest story to write. I needed help.

Ayomiposi Oladele-Onitiju gave me invaluable insight into Nigeria’s healthcare system from the perspective of someone working within it, and somehow made me miss my first degree in Microbiology (even though I’m definitely not going back, haha). Bayo Olophunda graciously gave the piece its first edits. And decided to repay me for all the stress I put him through with his Bellwether essays by taking on the deeply unglamorous work of beating this piece into shape and relentlessly challenging my thinking from late at night until the early hours of the morning. If you enjoy this essay, a good part of the credit belongs to his editorial judgement.

My Receipts

The Lancet Nigeria Commission

Adelusi-Adeluyi et al. in Medical History - the scholarly source behind the map

Cambridge Medical History on colonial healthcare in British Africa - for the wider history. .

The Guardian’s report on public ambulance coverage

BusinessDay on informal ambulance services

Africa Check on the “WHO doctor ratio” that does not exist

FIJ on Nigerians arrested for giving first aid

HumAngle’s survey on citizen distrust of the 112 emergency line

The dRPC’s analysis of Nigeria’s 2025 health budget - this is where the seventy naira calculation comes from. Their review of two decades of the Abuja Declaration is also worth your time if you are curious on how a 15 per cent pledge became a 5 per cent average across twenty years.

Health Policy and Planning on the politics of Nigerian health reform - the source of one of my favourite lines: a senior official describing a health sector with “no formal accountability system.”

MFWA on the DNA confirmation of Pelumi Onifade’s death

Chimamanda Adichie’s public account of her son’s death - her allegations, in her own words. The inquest is ongoing and the hospital disputes her account, which is part of why this essay exists.

The FRSC’s 2025 road statistics against the WHO’s estimate for the alarming statistics.

As of today, 25 pupils and teachers are still missing. In the days after, a teacher told reporters:

Sadly, this is not an unusual week in Nigeria, or Africa as a whole. I know because I produce stories on this continent for a living, and that knowledge has not gotten lighter with time. What I have been sitting with is how to hold it alongside something equally true and somehow harder to say: that the story of Nigeria is not as bleak as our current conversation around it suggests. This is my attempt to say so.

Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics documented 2.2 million kidnappings between May 2023 and April 2024, with families paying N2.23 trillion in ransom that year and 614,937 people killed in the same period. In November 2025, gunmen abducted more than 400 people, mostly schoolchildren, across four northern states in one surge - more numbers than the Chibok incident in 2014. On his first day in office, Tinubu removed the fuel subsidy that had been costing the country ₦18.4 billion daily, over ₦4 trillion in 2022 alone. One could argue that the reform was necessary from an economic standpoint, though many Nigerian economists have argued that the execution and palliatives were not. It was also humanly brutal. Food inflation stood at 16.06 percent in April 2026, the third consecutive monthly rise, sitting on top of two prior years of double-digit increases that the annual figure does not fully capture. This is the Pessimist’s stance.

But here’s what I have observed. Nigeria has become a place where you are unpatriotic if you have the slightest positive thing to say about it. To suggest that something might be working, or might eventually work, is to risk appearing naive - which is perhaps the one thing this class of commentator cannot afford. I am a journalist and I believe in honest reporting. But there is a difference between being unflinching and being selective, and I think we have started to confuse the two.

I have heard so many people say in recent years that they hate being Nigerian. I have watched the phrase Never Gonna Make It (ngmi), attach itself to the country like a diagnosis, repeated so often in timelines, that it has begun to feel like a consensus opinion. I hate it, but I understand the despair behind it.

What I find harder to understand, however, is the logic of writing off completely a country that will always reflect on your persona. You can leave Nigeria physically, but you cannot leave its essence behind. It travels with you: in your accent, in your story, in the first question people ask when they hear your name. Declaring it ‘finished’ does not release you from Nigerian association. It just determines how you carry it.

I also think that as citizens, we owe ourselves the virtue of precision. Do we truly hate Nigeria as a country, people, or place of being? Or do we hate the insecurity that took Michael’s life, the inflation that has made daily living unaffordable, the corruption that redirects public resources into private accounts, the state that has failed its people with remarkable consistency?

Hating a country for what it has failed to do is its own kind of grief. But we must never forget that what we call our hatred matters, because it determines what we believe is still possible.

Let us consider what the Pessimist is not counting.

For decades, Nigeria was Africa’s largest crude oil producer, and simultaneously, its largest importer of refined fuel. But now, that era is gone. The Dangote refinery, Africa’s largest, at 650,000 barrels per day, began operations in 2024 and by 2026, achieved net petrol exporter status in Africa by supplying 80 percent of Nigeria’s domestic gasoline demand while exporting to West Africa and Europe. There’s a lot to be said of its owner (and there is plenty), but it does not change the fact that foreign exchange reserves climbed from $33 billion in 2023 to nearly $50 billion by early 2026. S&P Global estimates the refinery is saving Nigeria over $10 billion in foreign exchange annually. None of that is making strong conversation in Nigeria’s online space.

Then there is Moniepoint, founded in Lagos in 2015, which processed N412 trillion — approximately $294 billion — in transactions in 2025, serving over two million small businesses with credit and payroll tools that formal banks spent decades not providing. Nigeria’s fintech ecosystem now has over 430 companies, nearly 28 percent of all fintech firms on the continent, with the nine leading firms valued at a combined $10.6 billion as of January 2026. In the same three years that Nigerians absorbed the pain of Tinubu’s reforms, the Nigerian Stock Exchange’s All Share Index rose from approximately 53,000 to over 242,000 (a nearly five-fold increase) and market capitalisation grew from N30 trillion to N160 trillion.

And then there is the Japa wave itself — the very thing cited as proof that Nigeria is ‘finished’. In 2024, Nigerians abroad sent home $20.93 billion in remittances, an 8.9 percent increase on the previous year and four times the value of Nigeria’s Foreign Direct Investment for the same period. Nigeria accounts for 35 percent of all remittance flows to Sub-Saharan Africa, which means that the people who left kept paying into the country. I see this as a wager on a country they still believe in, even from a distance.

None of this was handed on a golden platter. It was built under chronic epileptic power supply, a volatile currency, and a regulatory environment that is designed to obstruct rather than enable. The Ghanaian economist George Ayittey, in his 2006 book Africa Unchained, had a name for the people who built it — the Cheetah Generation. These are Africans who do not wait for the state to move but build around it, through it, and despite it.

I want to be clear that none of this cancels out the insecurity or the inflation. What it does is complicate the verdict.

This resilience can also be seen on the rest of the continent. Rwanda's economy grew 9.4 percent in 2025, surpassing its own projected target of seven percent, averaging above 7 percent over the past decade against a Sub-Saharan African average of 3.7 percent, and an extreme poverty rate that has fallen from around 60 percent in 2000 to 27.4 percent in 2024 by national standards. Rwanda is a politically complicated country and its model is not one to admire uncritically — anyone who follows its politics closely will tell you that. But these are its economic numbers so far, and they are real.

At the continental level, the African Development Bank reported that Africa’s true GDP grew 4.2 percent in 2025, outpacing the global average of 3.1 percent, with 22 countries growing above 5 percent. The IMF projects Nigeria’s GDP will reach $334 billion in 2026, making it Africa’s third-largest economy. Nigeria’s per capita output is projected to grow just 0.3 percent in the same period, meaning the headline growth is not yet reaching most people’s pockets. It is a gap that is that is crucial, and it demands to be fixed. But a gap in distribution should not be purported as an overall verdict on a country.

When the people with the most capacity to build, to invest, to push institutions and stay decide that withdrawal is the most honest response to Nigeria, bad things happen. Between 2023 and 2024, 43,221 doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and medical laboratory scientists left Nigeria. External migration in the health sector surged by 200 percent in that period, with 4,193 doctors and dentists leaving in 2024 alone, approximately 66 percent of them to the United Kingdom. Approximately half of all licensed medical doctors in Nigeria have now emigrated, but the patients they would have treated did not emigrate with them.

This affects not just labour, but capital too. Léonce Ndikumana, an economist at the University of Massachusetts who has spent decades tracking illicit financial outflows, estimates that Africa has lost over $2.8 trillion through unrecorded capital outflows since 1970 - a figure that exceeds the annual GDP of sub-Saharan Africa combined, accumulated over more than five decades. It is easy to think of them as numbers alone, but they also have faces too. They show up in waiting rooms, in understaffed wards, and in communities that needed those doctors and now have to manage without them.

The pessimism that dominates the Nigerian conversation has a methodology underneath it that has not been examined carefully enough. It counts the kidnapping and terrorism statistics but not the fintech infrastructure built beneath them. It counts the naira’s collapse but not the $20.93 billion in diaspora remittances Nigeria received in 2024 - four times the value of Nigeria’s Foreign Direct Investment in the same period. It treats the gap between macro growth and lived experience as evidence that nothing is working, rather than as evidence that distribution is broken and needs fixing. The Norwegian economist Morten Jerven showed in his 2013 book, Poor Numbers, that African GDP statistics systematically undercount economic activity - particularly the informal sector - because the statistical infrastructure to measure it was never properly built. We have been arguing about incomplete numbers for decades and presenting the incompleteness as evidence of failure.

Some will say that Nigeria’s progress is individual rather than collective, and that private enterprise is thriving while public sectors continue to fail. While I understand the argument, it mistakes the state for the collective. The informal economy employing the majority of Nigerians is collective. Fintech infrastructure serving over two million small businesses is collective. Remittances flowing into families across the country are individual decisions with collective consequence. What people usually mean when they make this argument is that the Nigerian state is failing - and of course, this is serious and worth fighting about. But the state and the collective are not the same thing. Conflating them is part of what produces the verdict before fully receiving any evidence.

Pessimism is not just a feeling. It is a methodology. And the dangerous thing about it is that like any methodology, it can be applied selectively and still pass as ‘truth’.

When you count everything - the terror and the fintechs, the brain drain and the remittances, the state’s failures and what people have built despite them - Nigeria is not a success story. But it is not a closed case either, and the people who know that better than anyone are not the ones writing the viral posts, tweets and threads online. I have become suspicious of the patriotism that requires me to stop counting.

My Receipts

The NBS Crime Survey 2024.

Morten Jerven’s Poor Numbers. It is an important read if you want to understand why African economic data is so contested.

Nonso Obikili’s Substack - this is where one of my favourite Nigerian economists writes specifically about what Nigerian economic data does and does not tell us. On the downside, it’s a private page. But on the upside, if you make it to his subscriber list, you’re definitely NOT missing out!

George Ayittey’s Africa Unchained - it was written in 2006, but in my opinion, is still one of the best arguments today for why the people are not the problem.

TechCabal’s Moniepoint report if you want to see what N412 trillion looks like broken down.

S&P Global on the Dangote refinery - it is the most rigorous external analysis of what the refinery has actually changed about Nigeria’s economy.

Nigeria remittances 2024 - Nairametrics - this is where I got the $20.93 billion figure and what it means for how we talk about Japa.

Postscript

Let me make a confession. I first started this Substack on a whim and vibes, with less than fully fleshed out ideas. But with time, I have found more clarity on not just about what I want to say, but about why it needed its own home.

That is what In This Moment is for. It is where I write about politics, culture, and society as things that affect our being, not just things we analyse from a distance. I want to interrogate what each moment in public life is doing to us, and how we should choose to respond — once a month, with a research-backed argument at its core.

What would you like me to dig into next?

From flights to long drives, it is the kind of movement that looks like productivity but, in reality, is just a way of not staying still long enough to think. I spend a lot of time beside windows. It is where I do my best thinking, or maybe just where I am finally forced to do it.

Somewhere in all that movement, I started noticing the questions I had been carrying. About age. About faith. About what I actually believe when nobody is watching. About love, which I think about more than I admit, and the current state of play for Africa and the world, which I cover for a living and which lately I find genuinely difficult to explain.

I have no answers. I am sharing this because I suspect some of you are carrying the same things, and that is usually enough of a reason.

1. Are we witnessing a collapse of the current world order?

In the first week of his second term, Trump cancelled 83 percent of USAID’s programmes. Global humanitarian funding fell from $27.6 billion in 2025 to $8 billion in 2026. A study published in the Lancet in February projected that if the cuts continue through 2030, at least 9.4 million people who would otherwise have lived will die. A child under five could die every 40 seconds. The senior State Department official who was asked about the Lancet study called it “a failed journal.” He said this without apparent embarrassment.

Last month, we also saw the United States and Israel declaring war on Iran. The last remaining nuclear arms control treaty between the US and Russia expires this month with nothing to replace it. Trump has withdrawn America from 66 international organizations since returning to office. Child mortality rose for the first time this century. The people dismantling the post-1945 architecture of international cooperation were elected, which is the part that keeps me up at night. You can argue with a tyrant. It is harder to argue with a mandate.

America has always pursued its interests above its stated values. What is different now is that it has stopped pretending otherwise. The mask is off. Future saw it coming. From what I have witnessed, some people across the Global South received this with something close to relief, for at least, we now know the true state of things. I have been that person. But I keep thinking about the countries that organized their survival around the assumption of American support: their health systems, food programmes, and even the delicate idea of ‘peace’ in conflict-ridden countries. What it means to discover that the country you built your house beside has decided your house is not its concern. The people who will pay for this decision were not in the room when it was made. They rarely are.

2. Is Africa fading from the world's attention, and does the world even care?

Sudan has been at war since April 2023. It is now the largest displacement crisis on earth, with over 11 million people forced from their homes. Most people outside Africa cannot name the two factions fighting. I do not say this to be superior. I say it because I think it is worth asking why. Gaza gets front pages. Ukraine gets front pages. Sudan gets, periodically, a paragraph.

I help cover African stories for a living. A 2025 report by Africa No Filter found that 69 percent of global media coverage about Nigeria carried a negative tone. For Kenya it was 88 percent. The same report found that negative media stereotypes are costing African countries up to $4.2 billion annually in inflated borrowing costs, because investor perception is shaped by what gets covered and how. Words, it turns out, apparently have interest rates.

The story I find hardest to tell is not the crisis. Everything happening alongside it, the innovation, the music, the argument, the ordinary complicated life, almost never makes the news. And when it does, it is usually because something or someone got a Western co-sign first. It could either be a foreign award, or a Tiktok moment that went viral abroad. As if the story was not already there, waiting. I have been trying to push against that. Some days I make progress. Other days the machine wins.

3. How many times can you file the same story before you start to lose faith?

On the evening of March 16, three suicide bombers struck Maiduguri during Iftar. One hit Monday Market. Another hit the Post Office Market. The third walked into the University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital. At least 23 people died, and residents say the numbers are higher. It was the first coordinated attack of its kind in Maiduguri in almost a decade. People had started to believe, cautiously, that something had changed there.

It had not.

Ten days before, suspected militants attacked Ngoshe in Borno State and abducted more than 300 civilians, including women and children. On March 9, militants raided the northeast overnight, killing at least 12 soldiers and three civilians. In February, gunmen attacked Nuku and Woro in Kwara State after residents refused to embrace Sharia law, killing at least 162 people. The UN Security Council issued a condemnation. Tinubu issued a statement. The villagers performed islamic rites and buried their dead.

I have read some versions of these sentences many times. The locations and death tolls change, but the statements from Abuja do not. The UN’s humanitarian coordinator for Nigeria said recently: you can no longer associate insecurity with a single region. It is almost everywhere. More than 40,000 people have been killed since the insurgency began in 2009. This means that an entire generation has grown up in displacement camps, knowing nothing else.

In December, Trump ordered airstrikes on jihadist positions in Sokoto, Northern Nigeria, and called it, with characteristic delicacy, ‘a Christmas present’. Analysts were largely unimpressed. The Center for Strategic and International Studies noted that isolated strikes are unlikely to significantly reduce the terrorist threat. The Nigerian government has deployed armed forces to two thirds of its states. The insurgency has adapted anyway.

Aid agencies project that up to 35 million Nigerians could face food insecurity in the coming months. The Nigerian state has offered condemnations and committees and military operations for seventeen years. The people living through it have absorbed all of it and kept moving, because what else is there to do? This resilience is real, but so too, is the cost of mistaking it too long for contentment.

4. Do we still have a middle class in Nigeria?

Nigeria once had a middle class estimated at around 38 percent of the population. By 2023, the African Development Bank put that figure at 23 percent. The World Bank now projects that Nigeria’s poverty rate will reach 62 percent in 2026, 141 million people. Between 2019 and 2023, average consumption per person fell by nearly seven percent. The share of ultra-poor Nigerians rose from 14 percent to 27 percent in the same period. The Tinubu administration disputes these figures. The arithmetic of daily life in this country says otherwise.

When the middle class disappears, civic life goes with it. That layer was where people had enough stability to care about things beyond survival. Where the arguments about what this country should become were actually held. When that layer thins, what is left is two Nigerias: the one that can afford to leave, and the one that cannot.

The professionals, the teachers, heck, even the journalists are leaving. I have friends who left in 2023 and friends who left in 2024 and friends who are leaving this year. Most of them are not coming back. The ones who stay, myself included, are spending so much energy on survival, that the things a society needs from its educated people are either getting done badly or not getting done at all. What Nigeria looks like in ten years, if this continues, is a question I find myself avoiding. Which, I suppose, is its own kind of answer.

5. What do we owe the church, and what does it owe us?

In 2025, a pastor in Plateau State was arrested after being found to run a child trafficking ring from his ministry. He confessed to buying and selling at least 13 children. The BBC’s documentary on TB Joshua, who at the time of his death had 4 million Facebook followers and received sitting heads of state as visitors, revealed widespread physical and sexual abuse spanning decades. Timothy Omotoso spent eight years on trial for rape and human trafficking before being acquitted in April 2025 on procedural grounds. His key accuser was shot dead outside her home three weeks before the verdict.

I was raised in the Christian faith and I still hold it, though more loosely than I was taught to. I know what the church means to millions of Nigerians: a community, a safety net, the only institution that shows up when the state does not. I am not interested in dismissing that.

But there is a difference between faith and the structures that claim to represent it. There are congregations in this country where the pastor’s word supersedes scripture, where questioning leadership is treated as spiritual failure, where seed-planting has become a sophisticated revenue model for men who fly private jets and helicopters. Nigeria has no shortage of registered religious organizations. Not all of them are doing what I have described. But the ones that are have become very good at disguising their greed for piety. And we have a habit, as a culture, of treating any scrutiny of these institutions as an attack on God himself.

I do not think God requires that protection. I think certain men do.

6. What is the price of documenting the world’s pain?

A 2025 Muck Rack survey of over 430 journalists found that 50 percent had considered quitting in the past year. Thirty-eight percent said their mental health had declined. Sixty-one percent said their workplace offered no mental health support whatsoever. I read that survey and felt simultaneously seen and unsurprised.

My exposure to trauma is mostly mediated, through screens, copies from the wire, and the voices of people I interview by phone from places I cannot reach. And still, there are days when I close my laptop and carry all of that grief and sadness into the evening, into dinner, into sleep. The weight of these stories accumulate quietly in my heart, in a way that is difficult to describe to people outside this line of work. Not in a dramatic or steady way, but more like a mild fever you keep forgetting you have.

The industry knows this and, in my opinion, does very little about it. We hold panel discussions. We write the reports. Then the next breaking story comes in and everyone goes back to the group chat. I say this not to be cynical but because I want to still be doing this work in twenty years, and I am not certain the current conditions make that possible.

7. Is there a version of this job that does not eventually drain you out?

Almost all journalists, 96 percent according to Muck Rack, say they have trouble switching off from work. Which means the inability to stop is not a personal failing. It is a structural condition we have normalized and largely left each person to manage alone. And it sits alongside another structural condition: the industry is contracting. In 2025, over 60 percent of journalists in Europe reported supplementing their income with other work. Everyone I know in the media is building something on the side. A newsletter. A podcast. A personal brand, which is a phrase I find quietly depressing but cannot seem to escape.

Somewhere in the past year I noticed a growing hunger for the stories that are not breaking, and the leads I found myself chasing without being assigned them. I came into journalism wanting to be at the centre of things. I still want that. I just no longer think the centre has to mean the loudest, fastest, most urgent version of events. I am a person who wants to report and write and occasionally say something that is true and difficult. Not perform a version of myself daily for an audience whose attention I am always one bad post away from losing.

Whether those two things, the work I want to do and the economy that currently surrounds it, can coexist is a question I am living inside rather than answering. Some days I think I am getting somewhere. Other days I abandon my laptop and watch a series until midnight. It is not a growth strategy. But it is, on certain days, the only thing that sounds like rest.

8. Is privacy dead on the internet?

I have a running joke with my friends that mobile apps these days know me better than they do. My location. My sleep patterns. The specific hour of the night when I am most likely to make decisions I will regret in the morning. The sad part is that it is not really a joke. It is a business model, and I consented to it in the way one consents to things one does not fully read because the alternative is not participating in modern life.

By 2025, the global data broker industry was valued at approximately $310 billion to $315 billion, built almost entirely on the details of lives people assumed were their own. In 2026, deepfakes are routine and cheap. It now takes almost no effort to fabricate a person saying something they never said, and enormous effort to correct the record after it spreads. We built the conditions for that ourselves, one terms-and-conditions agreement at a time. We are the monsters we made.

What unsettles me most, however, is not the violations, but the collective nonchalance of it all. The way we have accepted, without much discussion, that this is simply how things will be now. The speed with which surveillance became ambient. The ease with which we learned to live inside it.

9. Is social media making us worse people, or just honest?

When Anthony Joshua’s car hit a stationary truck on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway last December, two of his friends died. He crawled out of the wreckage and the people who gathered around him filmed it. Some of them stole from the victims. His phone was taken from him at the scene.

I have thought about that scene more than I expected to.

Not because it is shockingly novel, which I think is precisely the problem. We have watched this happen enough times, in enough places, that we have become desensitized and accepted it as a way of life rather than an indictment of it. Someone is suffering and the first thing we reach for is our phones. We have built platforms that reward the person who posts the video, and we have done it so thoroughly and for so long that the instinct to document now arrives before the instinct to help. Sometimes before the instinct to feel anything at all.

Sina Ghami and Latif Ayodele were not famous. They had been alive that morning. And what the internet has of that day is their ending, filmed by strangers.

I think we should be more troubled by that than we are.

10. Are Nigerian women progressing, or are we just better at documenting our regression?

Yesterday, videos began circulating from Ozoro in Delta State. I am not going to describe them in detail. If you have seen them, you know. If you have not, I would not recommend it, for they are extremely jarring.

Women were chased by men through the streets during a local festival, and were assaulted in public. Some of these men recorded the acts. Reports say women had been warned to stay indoors that day. The ones who did not were attacked for it. And all this happened during Women’s Month.

I have been doing this work long enough to know the shape of what comes next. There will be strongly worded statements, viral hashtags, and arrests, fifteen of which have happened so far. The news cycle that might most likely move on by next week. I have reported versions of this story before. I will probably report it again.

What I keep sitting with is not rage, though the rage is there. It is the tiredness. The specific tiredness of watching the same thing happen, in different places, with different names, on a rhythm so predictable you could almost set a calendar reminder by it. The 2024 Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey (NDHS) confirms that 1 in 3 Nigerian women—roughly 33 percent—have experienced physical or sexual violence. Thirty-three percent. And that only accounts for those who felt safe enough to speak out and air their grievances.

We have become very good, as a society, at performing outrage. The hashtags are faster than they used to be. The coalition letters are better written. And the women are still being told to stay indoors during festivals in their own communities, in 2026, as though the solution to male violence has always been female absence.

Nigerian women have made real strides. I believe that. But, I also believe that whatever progress has been made means very little to the women of Ozoro. We are past awareness. We are waiting for consequences.

11. What do I believe in when nobody is watching?

My relationship with God is the longest one I have. It is also the one I understand least.

I still pray, in the slightly embarrassed way of someone not entirely sure who they are talking to but who keeps talking anyway. I still find the Psalms beautiful, not as literature, but as the writing of people who were genuinely desperate and needed God to show up. I still think there is something in faith, the insistence on meaning, on grace, on the idea that accountability is real, that the secular world has not found a replacement for.

But somewhere between the churches I have covered and the God I actually talk to, a gap opened up. I cannot perform the certainty I was raised on anymore. I have decided to live in that gap honestly rather than pretend it is not there. Some days that feels like honesty. Other days it feels like something I lost. Most days it feels like both.

12. Is love the thing that arrives, or the thing you build?

Now that I am in my late twenties and single in Nigeria, I have officially been accredited for the Marriage Olympics. This means a steady rotation of aunties and uncles asking questions that are not really questions, and friends on permanent alert for when I will finally announce the one. I have started to wonder what would happen if I lied and told them I was gay, but purely as a social experiment. I suspect the ensuing chaos would be, at minimum, instructive.

But underneath the jokes there is something that genuinely troubles me. I have watched women around me live as though their current life is temporary, as though their real lives begin at the altar. Their names, their faith, their careers, their sense of who they are, all held loosely, as if on loan, until a husband arrives to make things permanent. I have watched brilliant women unconsciously shrink themselves and their life ambitions in anticipation of a man who has not even shown up yet. And I have wondered, more than once, whether I have done versions of this without realising it.

My belief is that we have been sold two versions of love and instructed to want both. The intense version that arrives and rearranges the foundations of our lives without asking. And my favourite, the quieter one that is built from very ordinary things—patience, light hearted conversations, humor, the willingness to be fully vulnerable and to keep showing up anyway. I want to believe both are real. I just think the second one is consistently underrated. And I believe you have to be a whole person to sustain either of them.

To my fellow athletes: may the force be with us all.

13. How do you keep your inner child alive?

I grew up watching Hannah Montana. I know, it sounds childish. But it was my first real introduction to the idea of an alter ego, and as an introverted child who found the world a little loud and a little much, that premise was deeply appealing. The idea that you could be two things at once. That there was a version of you the world saw, and a version that was just yours. That you did not have to choose between them.

Adulthood has a way of making you choose.

The self you perform for work and the self you actually are start to blur, and somewhere in the accumulation of deadlines and responsibilities and things you have to be, the quieter version gets harder to find. I notice it in small ways. The book I keep meaning to read for no professional reason. The restful afternoon I keep meaning to take for nothing in particular. I do not think this is a small thing. I think it is actually quite important, and I think we have collectively agreed to treat it as a luxury rather than a need.

I want the alter ego back. Not the costume or the wig. Just the permission for Chiamaka to be more than one thing. To be serious about the work and still, somewhere underneath it, the child who believed completely in the reality of worlds that did not exist. That child knew something. I am not ready to let her go.

Few things set Nigerian Twitter on fire like a woman choosing happiness on her own terms.

Last week, media personality Toke Makinwa announced she was pregnant through in-vitro fertilization. That same week, popular dancer and fitness coach, Dr. Kaffy, said men don’t want to marry her because she is a single mum of two. The internet responded in its usual way: some celebrating, others (mostly men) spiraling into moral panic, as if Nigerians haven’t been raising children in fractured families for generations.

God forbid a woman welcomes a child or builds a life without the shadow of a husband’s name.

On paper, critics have a point: children in two-parent households often enjoy more stability and shared responsibility. It looks neat, orderly, and predictable—the blueprint for the “perfect family.” But life rarely respects order, and neither do the numbers people like to throw around.

Critics sometimes reach for statistics. In the United States, for instance, nearly a third of single-mother households live in poverty, against just a small fraction of married couples. But poverty here is not marital status. It is classrooms without teachers, hospitals without doctors, or even children dropping out of school due to lack of food. To quote those numbers as proof against the Nigerian Single Mother is to confuse cause with excuse.

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The perfect family is a myth

Nigeria has never been a country of perfect nuclear families. In my hometown in Imo, I have met women who became widows after losing their husbands to war or conflict. They carried households alone, sometimes mediating land disputes or caring for aging parents, just as countless widows across Nigeria do. Across the North, the Delta, and the Middle Belt, families are fractured by poverty, disease, and migration. Women rebuild. If single mothers truly threatened civilization, Nigeria would have collapsed long ago.

Yes, the burden is heavy. A lone parent carries twice the weight of everything. But the burden does not collapse.

The evidence is clear: children thrive on education, healthcare, and some measure of financial stability—not on whether their parents share a roof. Yet over 20 million Nigerian children remain out of school, most in the North. A 2025 investigation in Sokoto revealed the cause plainly as hunger and poverty, not broken homes.

Even in dual-parent households, peace is not guaranteed. A father’s presence can sometimes mean silence in the face of abuse, absenteeism masked as authority, or economic strain. Meanwhile, children of single mothers grow up ambitious, determined, and resilient. The “perfect family” is not a template—it is fantasy. And holding on to it blinds us to the dangers children actually face.

The Single Mother, the Scapegoat

Part of the fear is understandable: parenting is hard, even with two people. But when one woman does it alone, society panics.

Men who father children outside marriage—or shirk responsibility entirely—rarely face condemnation. Women, by contrast, are demonized and painted as selfish, reckless, and ideological. Makinwa’s announcement was treated as if she had lit a match beneath Nigeria’s fragile social fabric. Yet no one blinks when men walk away from their children or when lawmakers siphon funds meant for schools and hospitals. The double standard is glaring.

Most single mothers are not rebels. They are widows of insurgency, survivors of abuse, women abandoned by men who walked away. For them, single parenthood is survival, not ideology. And survival is rarely glamorous.

History Remembers Them

This is not new. Precolonial Nigeria had flexible kinship structures, far from the nuclear family imposed by Victorian missionaries. Widows in Igbo and Yoruba societies leaned on extended families. Among the Tiv and Kanuri, women assumed leadership when men were gone. Society adapted. It did not collapse.

Modern history repeats the pattern. During the civil war of the late 1960s, countless Igbo women became sole providers, trading in markets and feeding children while husbands fought or died. After the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1990s, widows across Benue and Anambra raised orphaned children alone. Against impossible odds, those children lived. They learned. They grew. If anything held Nigeria together, it was these women. Not the absent men. Not the state.

A failure of a country

If the government cared for children, attention would focus less on mothers’ marital status and more on the rot undermining families. In the United States, single parents can count on programs like the Child Tax Credit, Earned Income Tax Credit, food stamps, or cash benefits under Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Nigeria offers no such cushion. What we have are half-cooked projects like the school feeding program, the National Social Investment Programme, or the occasional cash transfer scheme. These are initiatives that vanish as quickly as they appear, or reach only a fraction of the families that need them. The Universal Basic Education Act promised free schooling, but funding never arrived. The National Health Insurance Scheme has been repeatedly rebranded, as if a new graphic design could insure 200 million people. Today, only 19 percent of Nigerians are medically covered.

Families survive in spite of our failed state, not because of it. And yet society prefers a scapegoat: the woman raising a child alone. The government is invisible, while the problem remains, well, everything else.

Bottomline

The women raising children alone in Nigeria are not curiosities. They are not threats. They are widows of war and death, survivors of abuse and abandonment, daughters of a nation that failed them long before they had children of their own. And yet they feed, nurture, and send their children into the world with hope.

If collapse ever comes, it will not be because of them. It will be because we left them to carry too much for too long.

The least we can do is let them breathe.

“What does success mean to you?”

These were the words that greeted my subconscious at 6am today, shortly before I woke up. I still question why I decided to start my morning with such a serious thought.

Perhaps, it is because the world is less than 48 hours away from entering a new year. Or, maybe it’s because I dread the age I turn next year, and I want to improve my fortunes. Or, perhaps, the most accurate reason would be peer pressure, and wanting to ‘document my life’ the way “Gen-Zs” do. If only I had a million naira for every time I heard that phrase this year.

Whichever reason it is, it is a question that continues to haunt me, even hours later. I have heard that everyone has their metrics for success. In January 2024, I had four key areas to define my success: friendship, career, family, and God, with growth, connections, visibility, and, oddly enough, failure as my metrics. If I could not succeed at a particular task, how else will I know I tried?

Fast forward to December 2024. I might probably rank my success as a 6.5/10. I made more connections with people both professionally and platonically. I kept in touch with friends and bonded more with family. Visibility and failure were on an all-time low and high respectively (according to my standards), but that doesn’t mean I was not able to compensate fully for them.

You might want me to explain more of these details, but I think you’ll find them boring and an absolute waste of your time, especially if you already follow my work or socials. Instead, I will share my top three lessons that I learned from 2024 in the key areas, and hope that they will be of some use to you.

Family

Your family are your biggest cheerleaders

Anyone who knows me well understands how important family is to me. However, I never fully realized the extent to which I was valued by my family until 2024. I can’t count the countless times my mother, father, brother, and even extended family members expressed pride in the stories I shared, even giving me nicknames like “Prof.” The genuine joy and admiration they displayed were so palpable, I felt I could almost touch it.

They are part of my driving force, constantly motivating me to keep going. While I certainly desire recognition from a wider audience, I certainly can’t deny the value of positive feedback from my ‘Day Ones.’ They are also honest to a fault, so I can trust to receive equal amounts of criticism as well as praise.

Parents are not superhumans

I almost forgot to add this lesson, but I had this tweet to remind me:

And it’s not just the moms. There are times when you don’t feel like forgiving both your parents for certain actions, as if they should be fountains of infinite wisdom and always know what to do. But it was in 2024 that my eyes opened to the reality that parents also have their flaws, their weaknesses, and their imperfections. I had many conversations with both parents this year about finances and life. These conversations have helped me understand the mistakes they made, and I’m able to forgive them a little more each day.

Now, I know there are exceptions to every rule. I do not excuse the flaws of deadbeat or abusive parents, parents that decided that their duties were a burden and abandoned the children they brought into the world. But if you had a regular parent that did (or even surpassed) what was expected as parents, then surely you can be kinder. Give them some grace, give them some space.

Sometimes, you need to love family from afar

Speaking of flaws, this might be a nice segue into the fact that at a certain age, becoming physically independent from your folks becomes an ever-living fantasy. Being a woman in her mid-twenties who still lives with family has me nearly losing my mind with the mechanics of existing in the same space with them. Your privacy is never yours, and your freedom is astonishingly limited. It is my wish to relocate and have my own space next year. Hopefully, come December 2025, I do not return to this article with tears and regrets. Amen.

Friendship

Some friendships have expiry dates

I think the best analogy to explain this is with canned or packaged goods. On the side of these products, you’ll find an expiry date that indicates the end of the product’s shelf life. After this date, the product is no longer considered safe for consumption.

It might sound harsh, but this is how I’ve come to understand friendship distance/breakups. I experienced three instances of this this year. While the first two were largely due to my own neglect of my duties as a friend, the last incident seemed to stem from the fact that we had simply grown apart, and were no longer the same people we used to be. Some people only form friendships with a specific purpose in mind and then drift away once that purpose has been fulfilled.

I don’t condemn this practice, but for my own sanity (and yours if you find yourself in a similar situation), I’ve learned to assess friendships and consider their potential longevity. Is this a lifelong connection, or is it likely to fade away eventually? Even if you choose to ignore this possibility, one outcome or the other will inevitably occur. Better to know your stakes early in the game.

Effort makes friendship eternal

Another nice segue. If there was a bitter lesson I learned from the friendship breakups, it’s that my 2025 calendar needs to make space for friends in my life. It could be calls, or daily texts, or even hangouts if they are in the country. Old friends will always be a part of your story, and new friends are additions in the circle of love. Keep them both close.

There can be unity in your differences

This year, I made some unique friendships with people I never thought I’ll ever talk to. From partygoers to queer people to even Muslims, the list is endless. Growing up in a staunch Catholic home can make you irritated with people who are typically not like you, but once you get to meet and experience people a bit more, you’ll begin to see little pieces of yourself in everyone. It usually shows in shared interests — music, films, books, or even the sense of humor. As they say, “united we slay, divided we get lost on the way.” Or whatever the kids call it these days.

Career

Employee rights are REAL. Insist on them

This was the biggest lesson I learned as a worker in 2024. While some may be lucky to find companies with great employer branding, others may find themselves in the pits of corporate hell with delayed salaries, poor communication, etc. If you are in the latter, do not take the humble way out by endurance. Every employer and employee are bound by a contract, which also states your entitlements. Stick to them, no matter what. If the situation gets out of hand, seek a legal advisor. There is also the Nigeria Labor Act of 2004 to learn more about the rights of an employee.

Leave a company better than you met it

At its core, this simply means leaving a positive legacy. The popular saying “whatever doing is worth doing well,” is a call to action to ALWAYS be excellent. Not poor. Not average. Excellent.

I am still a far cry away from embodying thorough excellence in my work, but as a rule, I make sure to always stay critical and judgmental about the work I do, even if everyone else says it’s good. Did I miss an ‘i?’ Did I dot my t’s? As much as possible, I always try to spot issues in my work and improve on them. Upscaling with resource materials, trainings, and courses also helps in building useful skillsets. It not only helps the company, it also builds your reputation as someone of great value.

Be inspired, not jealous

I am said to be many things, but being jealous is not one of them. I don’t even know how the emotion feels like. But earlier this year, I spoke with a successful friend in the media industry whose colleagues constantly showed signs of jealousy towards his progress in the workplace and I was amazed that this was even a thing.

If you hate the fact that a colleague is doing better than you, then why waste the energy on jealousy? Shouldn’t that spur you on to be better at your work? At the end of the day, jealousy is a worthless emotion that leads nowhere. Be inspired, and work with that inspiration. Remember: your only competition is you.

God

No achievement is mine. All the Glory is His

I saved the best for last with the ‘God section.’ A miracle happened in late 2024 when I was poached from my previous to current job, especially at the time it happened. I almost wanted to shout from the rooftops with excitement, but I still needed to be cautious about being too boastful. The same God that giveth, is the same God that taketh away just as fast. Be grateful, but not boastful.

Wait on the Lord HAPPILY

Isaiah 40:31 says,

“But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.”

Waiting … ugh. I must say that it’s not my favorite thing to do. However, I am amazed at what people will wait for in the world, but who often will refuse to wait on God. This holiday, I have seen people stand in line for hours trying to watch a Funke Akindele movie. I have also seen people stand (and nearly kill each other) in long ATM queues for cash. It’s madness. Meanwhile, we refuse to wait on God. I have had to learn this lesson many times. I am a frequent flier within this course. I can’t help it. I just get in a hurry at times.

However, I am thankful for life for teaching me to slow down a little. While waiting is challenging, it is necessary. The wait is designed to bless us while the enemy would love for us to believe that it is designed to deprive us. We are all waiting on God to do something. As you wait, decide to approach it differently. Approach it through the eyes of one strengthening their faith. Change your perspective. You’ll be glad you did.

Have some date time with Jesus

This one can be the hardest, as I tend to prefer my physical dates to spiritual ones. However, I will be a fool if someone is doing all the work for me, and I can’t give Him some time in return. The few times I turned the pages of my Bible were some of the most ecstatic moments of this year. Reading certain portions of the Bible, (especially The Psalms), will have you feeling like a newborn: bright, energetic, ready for whatever the world throws at you, but most importantly, loved with the intensity of a thousand suns. You should try it sometime.

As we step into 2025, I hope you don’t just see the failures. I also hope you see the growth that happened to you in the midst of them. I hope you don’t have any regrets for the failed opportunities, but rather, have gratitude for what you gained. And I hope that for those whose lives took unexpected turns this year, you will find clarity, comfort, and love in the whirlwind. I am rooting for you.

With all my love,

ChiAmaka

Before you go…

I love to not only share my opinions, but great article/movie/podcast recommendations with my friends. It only feels right to now share them with a larger audience.

1. Read: In My Head There is a Market by Temitayo Akinyemi, Some Seasons I Have Known by Kemi Falodun, The Power of Garcia Marquez by John Lee Anderson.

2. Watch: The Six Triple Eight on Netflix, The Day After Tomorrow on Netflix (old movie, but still a gem), and Christmas in Lagos for some lighthearted laughs on Amazon Prime Video.

3. Listen: Sweet Medicine by Immaculata Abba (Studio Styles) and What Now? With Trevor Noah on Spotify (or wherever you stream your podcasts).

To my 37 followers and new readers, welcome to my blog. I must warn you that the story you’re about to read is one that is sad, sensitive, and triggering. But no matter its gruesomeness, it needs telling all the same.

“There is no gender war. Men are killing women, and that’s it.” — @theohotu on Twitter (X).

I assume that a sizeable number of us have heard of the word ‘femicide’, the intentional killing of women based on gender. We might have even heard of a couple of crimes related to this. But sometimes, we forget the true gravity of the word.

To help us understand femicides better, I will recount the recent, unfortunate case of Justina Nkang. It’s a story that many people might already know, but as often as we can, we need to remind ourselves of the realities at hand.

You see, for many people, October 22, 2023, was a normal day in Nigeria with the average man’s challenges. But for Justina Nkang, it was to be the worst day of her life — the day she was to be murdered by her boyfriend and dismembered.

Justina, who was a 300-level undergraduate student at the University of Port Harcourt, was last seen booking a ride from the Prestige Specialist Hospital.

It was two days later that her friend, Amanda, raised the alarm and sparked the search for Justina. She later got her wish and found Justina four days later — but as a dead and slowly rotting corpse in the house of her killer and three-year boyfriend, Damian Okoligwe. The smell was what prompted his neighbour, Emeka, to alert the authorities. Upon discovery, Justina’s dismembered body was found in a ghana-must-go bag. Her breasts and private parts were also missing.

It would have come as a surprise if he actually confessed. But true to a killer’s form, he didn’t. I’ll never forget watching him being paraded by the police in handcuffs on Channels TV, while repeatedly saying, “I didn’t kill her; I found her dead in my apartment.” It was for this reason that he also decided not to call the police.

Typical. The only thing missing from his statement is blaming the father of lies for his transgressions. But let me not digress.

Now, as expected, the story of Justina Nkang hit a nerve on social media. It sparked outrage against the killer as well as concerns about the high rate of femicides and missing women in the country. In 2022 alone, it was reported that at least 401 women died from sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) in Nigeria, with 45,000 women dying worldwide of femicide in 2021, according to UN Women.

But as usual, there would always be those who blame women for the cause of their demise, even in death. People like these guys.

The essence of telling you Justina’s story was to show you the true nature of femicides — that like its older cousin, Death, it is no respecter of persons. It doesn’t matter what you do, and who you are, it can catch up to you in the most unfortunate way.

In reading some of these comments,(as well as their follow-ups), you might notice a growing trend of awareness towards femicides and brutal killings of women. I consider this a win for gender advocacy, but I also can’t help but feel that there are critical underlying issues we have yet to talk about.

And while Justina’s story renewed the conversation, a true resolution to femicide and other forms of gender-based violence (GBV) cannot be achieved without addressing them.

To avoid speaking from a place of ignorance, I had a gender advocate and Gatefield’s Chief of Staff, Joy Una; Gender and Development Worker, Tawakalit Kareem; and Twitter feminist voice, Sharon Oluwalana, speak to me on some key elements still missing in Nigeria’s femicide conversations.

The need for a multi-sectoral approach

For Joy, many gender advocates, civil societies, and non-governmental organizations are already doing the groundwork to address femicides, but it can never “replace the workings of an efficient and effective government.”

She suggests that in order to create positive behavioral change, there was a need for government agencies such as the National Orientation Agency (NOA), the education sector, and private sector industries eg Nigeria’s entertainment industry, ‘Nollywood’, to draw out a comprehensive plan for a specific duration of years that would instill the necessary values and “create positive messaging that would eventually lead to the respect of the autonomy of these women,” she says.

Despite the lack of strong cross-collaboration with all of these sectors, there have been partnerships in recent years between international human rights organisations like the UN Women and A-list Nigerian actresses such as Stephanie Okereke Linus and Genevieve Nnaji in championing the fight against gender-based violence.

“People need to know the consequences of bad behavior.”

Other critical points that Joy raised were the demands for stronger law enforcement and legislature, and robust policy actions. She strongly emphasised the need for legal retribution against SGBV perpetrators.

“This way, it serves as a deterrent to anyone else who might want to do the same thing,” she said.

To add context, statistics show that the ratio between the number of reported cases and convicted felons of GBV is extremely low, to put it mildly.

In October 2023, the current Minister of Women Affairs, Mrs Uju Kennedy-Ohanenye, reported that within the last four years, only 306 offenders from 8,540 open cases have been convicted. Between September and October alone, 24,720 cases of gender-based violence have already been recorded, with 975 fatal cases and 1,505 cases closed due to fear and intimidation from the survivors or even their communities.

Enough with the cautionary tales for women. Men are the cause.

You’d agree with me that a critical part of the femicide conversation is not only the elements missing but also what needs to be taken out. And for Sharon, the incessant cautionary tales of men for women is a good place to start.

“Men are the ones killing women. Women that speak up are tagged with all sorts of names until everyone forgets that men are actually doing the damage,” she further emphasised.

The intentions for these cautionary tales from certain men, according to Tawakalit, are usually birthed from an angle of ‘financial insecurity.” It comes with the feeling of jealousy that the woman in question is not paying these sets of men enough attention due to their low income. In her words, “Shebi you want to follow rich man? You go see.”

Respect for the (woman’s) right to life

In many of the conversations online, I have noticed that there is a lack of respect for the woman's right to life from a good number of men. And I’m glad that Tawakalit noticed it too.

“Let me give an example. When Augusta’s (aka Austa) case was trending online, there were interactions and engagement with people trying to seek solutions. Shortly after that, the case of Mohbad’s death came to the limelight, and that caught national attention. Some feminists tried to bring it to the limelight and they were being shut down because Mohbad was the subject of conversation. But wasn’t she also human? Did her death no longer matter because she was a woman?” she cried.

Thankfully, Austa’s killer was apprehended on October 21, 2023, by her brother with the help of Sierra Leone authorities in Freetown. But the fact still remains that women’s rights are also human rights, especially our right to life.

A feminist champion of women’s rights in government

To wrap things up, according to Joy, Nigeria desperately needs ‘feminist women’ spearheading the fight against femicide, as well as other forms of SGBV.

This dig was precisely made at Ohanenye, who has only clocked a month in office but has made a series of gaffes — from her threatening the United Nations with a lawsuit over ‘mismanaged funds’ to her leaked audio threatening imprisonment on sexual harassment survivors of the University of Calabar’s (UNICAL) former dean, Dr Cyril Ndifon.

The former Women’s Affairs minister, Pauline Tallen, wasn’t a saint either. In June 2023, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) accused her of alleged misappropriation of funds and corrupt enrichment to the tune of N2 billion. In 2017, another Women’s Affairs minister in Goodluck Jonathan’s regime (2011–2015), Zainab Maina, was accused of defaulting on a N61 million loan from the National Economic Reconstruction Fund (NERFUND). This loan was not used for the benefit of women but as collateral to finance her personal business.

With the crop of ministers we’ve seen hold office, Joy’s comment serves as a wake-up call to the Minister of Women’s Affairs.

We need a woman who is not guided by the current cultural norms of the subservience of women to the men in their lives and society. We need a woman who will campaign for us, not just publicly, but privately in the rooms that matter. We need the “feminist woman” to launch policies that address femicide and gender-based violence legislature, enforcement, and even eradication.

And we need her now.

I know you want to leave now, but please give me two minutes of your time to fill out this survey. I’d like to know your thoughts and write better articles for YOU.

Write for a couple of months. Stop. Write for a week or two. Stop again. Write for some hours. Give up on writing career. Then feel an irrepressible urge to pick up the pen (or keyboard) after some months, and write again.

Is the curse of being a writer to have these phases of inconsistency? Or am I alone in the struggle?

Whatever the answer may be, one thing I know for sure is that this was to be my fate for several months. Before October 2022, this blog was my happy place. From stories of my father to a rape survivor and even Almajiri children, there was no end to the subjects that lived here. They made my existing readers chuckle, nod their heads in agreement, or even shed a tear.

Until I realized that a writer cannot survive on Medium alone. I need an actual job that pays actual money and will settle actual bills.

This need for survival made to transition from publicist to journalist, and I kissed my blog goodbye. I started working at Zikoko Citizen, a promising newsroom that essentially made political and business news less boring for a Gen Z audience. It had its challenges at first, but with time, what once started as a burden became my passion. There were a lot of things that I grew to love.

I loved that fresh feeling of being part of the pioneer team of a publication no media company in Nigeria had ever attempted before. I loved my eventual growth from writing satirical articles to writing feature stories on people, women whose voices deserved to be heard. I loved that my work was slowly but surely getting recognition online. I loved that I could find another happy place aside from Medium, one I did meaningful work in and could pay me relatively well.

Until the company (and I) reached another realization — a publication like ours in Nigeria was not commercially viable. Simply put, we were not making money, and that was a problem for the company, business-wise. Their solution? Dissolve the department and lay off half of the team.

The solution saved the company precious millions of Naira from payroll, but it also left ugly scars on the careers of those affected. Some who lost their jobs are still on the hunt for job offers. Some have gotten new jobs, but are no longer in journalism. Some are like me, who didn’t lose their jobs but are either learning to love what they currently do or patiently waiting for the next best thing.

I expect that some readers seeing this would have a half-bread-better-than-none mentality, but you cannot fully know the fit of a man’s shoes until you decide to wear them. Maybe I’ll explain more about this in another article.

In essence, I am trying to say that situations and circumstances have pushed me to my humble beginnings and first love, Medium. I almost wanted to deactivate this page, but I realized that the irrepressible urge to write (again) was too seductive to resist. Writing to me is my life source, without which I find no purpose.

Even with my minute follower count of nineteen, I have grown to love and accept this audience. They followed me because they too, have grown to love the subjects that live on this page, and they are waiting for more. They believe in me, my talents, and my skills, and they are counting on me to share articles that they would find insightful, funny, relatable, or emotional. Articles that could either brighten up their day, make them feel less alone in the world, or create a positive shift in mindset. I have let them down on this promise for more than a year, and I humbly pledge not to do so again.

Hence, the re-introduction.

So, if you’re new here, my name is ChiAmaka (preferably with a capital ‘A’). My aim for this humble blog is to become a home for my stories and that of the average ‘Nigerian Joe’ — our thoughts, our personal and societal struggles, and our aspirations. Simply put, a home for the stories of everyday Nigerians.

And for existing followers, my name is ChiAmaka and it’s nice to meet you (again). You can expect more consistency (fingers crossed), improvement in the subject matter and quality of my stories, and overall, a better reading experience. I’m happy that you stuck with me throughout my dormant phase, and I will try to make you not regret it. Please note the emphasis :)

Until the next article, bonne chance.

I know you want to leave now, but please give me two minutes of your time to fill out this survey. I’d like to know your thoughts and write better articles for YOU.